Monday, December 03, 2012

Stuart Shieber
is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, Faculty
Co-Director of the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society,
Director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), and
chief architect of the Harvard Open Access (OA) Policy — a 2008 initiative that has seen Harvard
become a major force in the OA movement.

When
in 1989 Stuart Shieber became a Harvard faculty member he was, for reasons he
never fully understood, appointed to a series of library committees. Whatever
the reason for his appointment, it was to prove an educational experience: As
he sat through the various committee meetings, Shieber began to see the world
through the lens of the library, a perspective that led him to the inevitable
conclusion that there was something amiss in the world of scholarly
communication.

Stuart Shieber

As
he puts it, “[I]t became increasingly clear to me that some of the problems
that libraries faced in dealing with providing access to the scholarly
literature were not library problems per se, but rather, problems in how the
scholarly communication systems are set up.”

This
is worth noting because when researchers face difficulties accessing scholarly
journals they tend to assume that something has gone awry in the library, not
that there is a fundamental flaw in the way research is communicated.

It
was only in sitting through all those library committee meetings that Shieber came
to realise the research community had a serious problem on its hands, a problem
moreover that could only be expected to get worse unless action was taken. And it
was clear to Shieber that researchers themselves would need to play their part
in resolving the problem.

Stated
simply, the problem is this: When researchers publish their papers, they
routinely sign over the commercial exploitation rights in them to the
publisher. The publisher then packages a bunch of papers together and sells them
back to the research community in the form of a journal subscription. While
publishers undoubtedly add some value to the end product, researchers do most
of the work — not just in authoring the papers in the first place, but also in
peer reviewing their colleagues’ papers (without charge). Yet, as any librarian
will tell you, subscription charges are inexcusably high, and getting higher
each year.

In
short, publishers are overcharging for scholarly journals. And since it is they
who pay the bills, it was librarians who first sounded the alarm. However,
since the costs do not come from their budgets, and journals are made available
in institutions on a free-at-the-point-of-use basis, most researchers have been
unaware of the seriousness of the problem. For their part, publishers have
consistently denied that they are
overcharging.

Why
are journals so expensive? They are expensive for a number of reasons, but
mainly because there is a disconnect in the scholarly journal market: that is,
the people who pay the journal subscriptions are not the people who use the
journals. As we shall see, this means that there is no effective market
mechanism to control prices.

And
as the number of papers published continues to grow, and libraries face ever
greater pressure on their budgets, so the struggle to provide faculty with
access to all the papers they need has become ever more serious. This phenomenon
is now generally referred to as the “serials crisis”.

As
I hope will become apparent, it helps to see the serials crisis as a
double-headed problem. As libraries are forced to cancel more and more journals
each year, researchers face a growing accessibility
problem. However, this accessibility
problem is merely a symptom of the deeper problem — what one might call the affordability problem. The key challenge,
of course, is to find a solution.

Open Access

Over
the years various solutions to the serials crisis have been proposed. However, the
one that has gained the greatest mindshare is Open Access (OA). And it is no surprise that
librarians played a key role in the development of the OA movement — not least
by co-founding the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in 1998, and
constantly promoting the merits of OA.

Essentially,
advocates for OA argue that all published research can and should be made
freely available on the Web, either by means of green OA, in which
researchers continue to publish in subscription journals but then self-archive
their papers in their institutional
repository
(usually after an embargo period so that publishers can recover their costs),
or by means of gold OA, in which
researchers (or more usually their funders) pay publishers an
article-processing charge (APC) to ensure that their paper is
made freely available on the Web at the time of publication. The latter can be achieved
either by publishing in an OA journal (the entire contents of which are made
freely available), or in a hybrid journal (a
subscription journal in which individual papers can be made OA if the author
pays an APC).

Concluding
that Open Access offered a viable solution to the double-headed problem facing
the research community, Shieber began to advocate for OA at Harvard ...

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If you wish to read the interview with Stuart Shieber, please click on the link below.

I
am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so
you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you
credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do
not use it for any commercial purpose.